No TV show has ever loved maths as much as Futurama

Fourteen years after its
premiere, Futurama has finally come to to an end
-- again. After four seasons of neglect on the FOX network, the
brilliant animated sci-fi comedy was cancelled in 2003, then rode a
wave of fan goodwill to resurrection in a series of DVD movies and
two seasons on Comedy Central before its series finale in
September. The beloved series will live on in an extensive network
of Wikis, subreddits, and memes,
but according to physicist and maths enthusiast Simon Singh
in his latest book, The Simpsons
and Their Mathematical Secret, the show's most impressive
legacy is its celebration of mathematics.

Longtime readers know how deep the numerical references
go on Futurama. The highly
educated writing team features no less than three
former Simpsons writers with PhDs -- Ken Keeler,
Jeff Westbrook, and Bill Odenkirk -- who packed episodes with maths
and science content far more freely than they did on that
other animated series. Two months after the show's finale,
Wired spoke to Singh and Futurama executive
producer and head writer David X. Cohen
about Futurama's legacy, mathematical and
otherwise.

Wired: It seems like the writers grew increasingly
comfortable integrating maths and science into episode plots over
the series run. Was there a conscious confidence boost from coming
back from cancellations, like "our viewers will follow us anywhere
at this point, so we're just going to go for it?"

Cohen: [laughs] It wasn't quite that rigid a
cutoff as the point between Fox and Comedy Central. It was more a
steady learning process, where when we first started writing the
show [14 years ago], we were afraid to hit the
science and the sci-fi too hard. We were coming out
of The Simpsons, and we didn't know how far we could
stray from that model of prime-time cartoons. We didn't know if
people were going to be on board for the sci-fi stuff, or if they
only wanted to see the characters, the purely home-based stories
that they were used to. And because of the long feedback loop of
animation, where you write it and it doesn't air for a year, it
took a couple of years before we started realising, "hey, the fans
are really responding to the episodes where we stick to sci-fi more
seriously."

So it was a few years before we really started to pay full
attention to the sci-fi angle of it. And throughout the whole run
to the end, I always found that a) the fans really like those
episodes that are the most sci-fi heavy, and b) even more to my
surprise, the comedy often seems to play better in those episodes.
So we didn't really have to sacrifice anything, because when you
set this huge dramatic backdrop of a science fiction story, if you
take that seriously, there's actually a very tense mood to the
episode and the comedy is a real release.

Simon's book details the many elaborate maths
references embedded throughout the episodes, which are
often way more complex than is obvious to most viewers. How did
these develop?

Cohen: We realised at first in The
Simpsons, and later carrying on the tradition
in Futurama, that we could hide these jokes in the
background that were called freeze-frame jokes, because early on it
was the beginning of the VCR era. It's ancient history now, but
people finally had a way to literally freeze-frame, and use
freeze-frame jokes for the first time. So we decided to fill that
niche, and we would not just waste a space in the background with a
generic sign that said "Supermarket open 8am to 5pm" or whatever,
but we would put it, in Futurama for example, in
an alien
language that was a code, and a joke if you could decode it,
that said "Human Meat for Sale, $5 a pound", or something like
that. So we tried to cash in on every bit of real estate in space
and time in the show.

The working principle was, well, we can put jokes in the
background where most people will ignore it, but only a handful of
people in the country, in the world, will get it, and it won't
derail the other people. So if you make a lot of obscure jokes and
references on a lot of different subjects in the background, then
many of the viewers will have their glorious viewing moment where
they'll say "oh my God, I can't believe they put in that joke for
me." Once you get a viewer who has experienced that moment, you
really have scored a permanent fan at that point, because nobody is
catering to such a tiny group as many of these jokes that we stick
in the background are.

Singh: One of the questions that people ask me
is why do [the writers] put in these mathematical references. And I
suggest that in a way you're reaching out to those people who are a
bit like you when you were growing up. It just makes them feel more
comforted and have pride in their interest in mathematics or other
geeky and nerdy subjects. Is that fair?

Cohen: Yes, I think that is fair. I mean it's
sort of a two-part thing. The subject matter of the maths
references is just stuff that many of the writers, including me,
were very interested in, and it's just fun for us to put it in
because we ourselves would have enjoyed seeing those references.
You just have more confidence and more interest in things that are
close to your heart. Of course the writers who have that background
like to ram the stuff in when they could, because you don't get
that opportunity on most TV shows, and writing
for Futurama and The
Simpsons you do, so you cash in on sneaking in something
that you personally think is cool.

And part two is can we fire up interest in the new generation of
viewers in these things that we like. Once in awhile I do have the
thought, oh you know, if I'm spending my life making this cartoon
show instead of doing some important academic research, I can still
feel better about myself because if we make science and maths
interesting or cool in any way to a new generation of people, then
I do feel a bit better about myself sometimes when we manage to do
that.

Of all the
maths-infused Futurama plots, like "Prisoner of
Benda" and "2D Blacktop," which are you most proud of?

Cohen: Well obviously "Prisoner of Benda" is
the standout example of maths actually being the star of
Futurama. This is an episode where the Professor invents a
machine that can switch people's brains from one body to another,
but once two characters have switched brains, the machine has a
defect that cannot switch their brains back. We just introduced
that concept the machine can't switch back, purely as a way of
making the plot more complicated. We weren't initially thinking
about the mathematics of it. But then we started to run through the
plot, thinking, "ok, if characters A and B switch brains, then we
want to get them back, then they're going to have to start
switching with other people, and try to worm their way through a
number of characters to get it back into their own head." And we
started thinking, "oh my God, is this even possible. Can it be
done?"

It so happened that Ken Keeler, who's come up several times now,
was writing the episode already, so he jumped wholeheartedly into
the subject and started thinking about the maths of it, and ended
up proving a theorem, which is referred to as Keeler's
theorem in Simon's book. He showed that in this case, no
matter how mixed up people's brains were, if you brought in two new
characters who hadn't had their brains switched around yet, you
could always use them to get everyone else's brain back to the
original spot, including the two new people who end up with their
correct brains as well. So he actually proved this mathematically,
and at the climactic moment of the episode, we flashed the full mathematical proof on screen for about one second,
which is about as much as people who weren't following the maths
could stomach. But front and centre, mathematical proof behind the
entire screen at the climax of the episode. You're not going to see
that on most sitcoms on TV, so that's a moment of pride
for Futurama.

Singh: And Ken is always mildly embarrassed
when it's called Keeler's theorem, or the Futurama theorem, because he thinks it's slightly too
grand a title for his work. But as you say, it's the only example
of a new piece of mathematics being created in order to resolve a
plot point in a sitcom.

Are there any mathematical concepts that you meant to
explore in Futurama but didn't get around
to?

Cohen: I can think of one thing. I mentioned
these alien
languages that are secret codes in the background. So the
first one was a very simple substitution code where each number
just stands for an English letter, and the second one was a more
complicated code, and we actually had a third language designed and
ready to go, but we never got around to using it. The thinking was
that at some point we would put in a more cryptographically secure
code in the background that computers might have to improve a
little bit from the time that we put it in. But the degree of
difficulty there was very high in terms of how to set up the code,
and would people solve it in our lifetime, a lot of complicated
guesswork not really related to producing the show. It was a little
too ambitious.

There are so many Futurama
memes that have taken off online. Are there any that
you're particularly surprised that fans seized on?

Cohen: I'm just going to rephrase the question.
The Futurama meme that really stands out in my mind is Fry
in the Apple store, or the Mom store, don't tell anyone there's a
close parallel there. That was the one where basically they're
telling him all the defects of the iPhone, it's slow, it doesn't
have that much memory, it's gonna lose it's connection, and he says
"shut up and take my money."

That's the one line out of all the things that fans picked up on
as memes, that at the time we were writing it, I immediately said
"that is going to catch on," because it just seemed to so capture
the mood of the moment. One of the real-life iPhones was just
coming out at the time we were writing it, and this line is really
summing up this moment in history. Now of course, it then took a
year for that episode to get animated and put on the air, so a few
months later I'm thinking "this line was so perfect, but the craze
passed," but, what do you know, like clockwork, Apple announced
their next one one year later, so once again it was perfect timing
by the time it aired. So that one worked out partly by skill and
partly by the good timing of Apple's release schedule.

Futurama fans were pretty unhappy the
first time the show ended, but this time around you finally got to
end the show on your own terms. Two months after the series finale,
is there a nagging Futurama-sized void in your life, or an
actual sense of closure?

Cohen: Well, it's a little of both. But still I
guess I would still stand by the feeling that it does have some
completeness to it now, mainly because the first one, two, or three
times we got cancelled, depending on how you add it up exactly, it
always felt like we still had not quite reached the critical mass
of what you could say was a successful run for a series. The first
time we had 70 episodes, and then we had the DVD movies, and then
we had one more season. It was always like, we never had quite 100
episodes, or whatever you had in your mind as, "we did it." Not
just in terms of numbers, but in terms of the feeling of how long
it's been on the air and the number of stories we've told, I feel
like [this time] we really got to explore everything in great
detail. Could we have gone further? Of course, it's a very big
universe in Futurama. But I don't have a feeling that
we were chopped off anymore.

Do you have a sense of what's next, now
that Futurama is ostensibly over?

Cohen: My immediate plan when the show ending
was announced was that I was going to take the summer off, because
really when Futurama or The
Simpsons were in production, it was quite grueling. It's
12 months a year of work, there's no break like there is on a
live-action show, because even if we finish the batch of scripts
we're working on, all of the episodes are in the animation pipeline
coming back every week, really, in different stages, and you have
to do a little rewrite then, sometimes a big rewrite, rethink the
staging, or the episode's too long. So there's not a moment's rest,
really. In the case of The Simpsons, that's been going on for
26 years now. For Futurama, even starting over again
after the cancellations, we did the DVD movies going straight into
four years on Comedy Central. We had six years of nonstop work,
basically.

So I've been at this a long time and thought I'd take the summer
off. Well, it's not summer anymore … but I'm still taking the
summer off. I'm still recuperating a little bit, but I'm getting to
a point now where I need to start something new. I have some
general ideas, but I'm not going to share them because there's
about nine of them, and any one that I share that is not the one I
do, I'll be giving it away for free. But you know, there's a lot of
outlets for entertainment now that didn't exist last time around,
so certainly it's tempting to think about doing something much
wackier and either self-produced or straight to the Internet, or I
don't know. There's a lot of room for experimentation now that
didn't exist before. So I have a few ideas that are more
unconventional -- but I don't promise to do them.

Do you see the maths legacy
of Futurama and The
Simpsons carrying over to other shows?

Singh: I think it's just a unique phenomenon.
People ask me "where else does this occur?" And it just doesn't
occur anywhere else. People talk
about Numbers or they talk about Big
Bang Theory. I think Big Bang Theory is great,
but it's not a surprise that there's maths in it. It's absolutely
shocking that there's maths in The Simpsons, and it's
truly shocking that there's pure maths, beyond the science, in
Futurama. So I'm not sure that's something that will
necessarily crop up again. It's only happened twice so far, and may
not recur. I can't see a way for it to happen, but then we don't
actually know what David is working on next.

Cohen: [laughs] If any other show tries to
prove a theorem, we're going to sue them.